As reforms stall, a Ukrainian cultural revolution

ODESSA, Ukraine — Ukraine’s political reformers and corruption-busters might be disappointed. But its artists, musicians and filmmakers have plenty to be excited about.

In the wake of the 2014 Maidan Revolution and the breakout of war in the east, the country is undergoing a fast-paced cultural renaissance that recalls the tumultuous 1960s in the United States and Western Europe.

Films about Ukraine and the war are being churned out at a furious pace, and a new generation of artists is challenging the status quo. Having walled itself off from Russian media, Ukraine is also fast discovering its rich cultural heritage, which was kept under wraps during the Soviet era.

Here are five ways in which violence, crisis and revolution are driving Ukrainian arts and culture.

Grotesque ‘steampunk’ masks

As the war with Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east grinds on mercilessly, the horrific masks designed by Bob Basset — in an art studio founded by two Kharkhiv-based brothers, Serhii and Oleg Petrov — have tapped into Ukraine’s tortured zeitgeist.

Bob Basset BGE Steampunk Gas Mask | Bob Basset

Once seen as a fringe product, the brand has seen its profile skyrocket since the war, with solo shows in Ukraine’s top galleries. Their horse and unicorn masks and dragon backpacks often feature on the runway shows of the country’s top fashion designers.

Its red leather full-face masks — featuring goggles that recall the improvised gas masks worn by protesters during the revolution — have even shown up in music videos by Western artists like Slipknot and Avril Lavigne.

“Their worlds are phantasmagorical and disturbing, but they are still similar to our one,” said Yevhen Berezhnitsky, director of Kiev’s Berezhnitsky Aesthetics, which hosted a show of their works this past spring.

House of Cards

Izolyatsia, an industrial art space in a former shipyard in Ukraine’s capital Kiev, has brought the scars of the war-torn Donbass into the heart of Ukraine’s once-insular art world.

The art collective from Donetsk moved to Kiev in the summer of 2014 after separatists stormed its premises and destroyed most of its artworks. Since moving shop, the edgy art space has championed causes of identity, conflict and displaced people — issues that are central to a nation at war in the process of making an epochal shift from East to West.

The space’s young, hip curator Kateryna Filyuk dismisses the older generation of Ukrainian artists as “completely irrelevant to today’s Ukraine.” Instead, the art space promotes younger artists like Donetsk’s Sergei Zakharov, who created a collapsing “House of Cards” from large playing cards embossed with images of separatist leaders, with Putin as the joker. The installation was exhibited in Paris recently in a show entitled “Culture and Conflict: Izolyatsia in Exile.”

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of one of Russia’s largest oil companies, holds a press conference in the Izolyatsia industrial art space in Donetsk in April 2014 | Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Made in Ukraine

With patriotism spiking in the face of the country’s war with Russia, a younger generation is rediscovering and promoting a fierce Ukrainian identity.

The cultural scene has been transformed by a “Made in Ukraine” movement, which is taking over fashion, crafts and design. A four-floor, high-end retail store Vsi Svoi (All Ours) selling exclusively Ukrainian fashion brands opened on the city’s main drag late last year, where it competes with neighboring Zara and Mango.

T-shirts with slogans like “Putin is a dick” and “Separatist buyers club” are top sellers at the chic space, the most high-profile of numerous pop-ups and other boutiques promoting local fashion.

Patriotic fashion designers have also been updating the country’s traditional embroidered Vyshyvanka blouses and tunics for the modern world, and Slavic patterns have been popping up on runway shows in Western Ukraine.

There are similar movements in design, music and even food, with growing demand for locally produced organic products like milk, cheese, vegetables and spirits.

“Both the absence of Russian culture and the nationalism has given Ukrainian culture a big push,” said Vladislav Davidzon, editor-in-chief of Odessa Review, a bimonthly English-language arts glossy from Ukraine.

Jamala’s 2015 Eurovision win for Ukraine with her sad dirge about the deportation of Crimean Tatars during WWII also sent a signal to the country that Ukrainian patriotism can be successfully internationalized.

Ukrainian New Wave

The push toward exploring Ukrainian themes in art and culture is nowhere more prominent than in the country’s burgeoning film industry, which has boomed since the revolution.

As the country has weaned itself off of the Russian films and shows that once made up the bulk of television programming, there’s been a huge demand for local production. Boosted by state funding and an energized new generation of filmmakers, the result has been a renaissance in Ukrainian cinema.

Prominent among the new generation of Ukrainian filmmakers is 35-year-old Roman Bondarchuk, whose nuanced documentary, “Dixieland,” about a children’s jazz orchestra in a small Ukrainian city, won the top prize at the recent Odessa International Film Festival.

His previous film, “Ukrainian Sheriffs,” was the Ukrainian entry for the Oscars last year. Meanwhile, a satirical Ukrainian TV show, “Servant of the People,” about an ordinary high school teacher who becomes the president of Ukraine, has won plaudits from critics worldwide and is now available for streaming on Netflix.

As Lenin statues come crashing down, monuments to Shevchenko are being erected.

“Frost,” a big budget Lithuanian-French-Ukrainian feature film about Western humanitarian volunteers in the country’s war zone — starring cult French actress Vanessa Paradis — was screened at the Director’s Fortnight section in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And a fierce buzz is building around “Cyborgs,” an intense war documentary about Ukraine’s heroic defense of the Donetsk airport, which is set to hit theaters later this year.

“The war released tremendous energies that have gone into the arts and film,” said Davidzon from the Odessa Review, who claims that Ukrainian cinema might be the “next Romanian new wave.”

Rediscovering Taras Shevchenko

Before the war with Russia, Ukraine’s culture was seen as a continuum of the post-Soviet cultural space. Ukrainians considered Russian writers like Pushkin and Chekhov part of their literary tradition.

These days, Ukrainians are more interested in rediscovering their own high culture, especially the works of poet Taras Shevchenko, considered by many to be the father of the modern Ukrainian nation.

A nationalist 19th-century Ukrainian poet, who came of age when the country was part of the Russian empire, Shevchenko looms large over modern Ukraine.

Exiled to Kazakhastan for his anti-czarist satirical poetry, Shevchenko died broken and penniless in St. Petersburg at the age of 47. He is now seen as giving his life for Ukraine’s liberation from the Russian empire.

A nationalist 19th-century Ukrainian poet, Shevchenko looms large over modern Ukraine | Sergey Supinski/AFP via Getty Images

His memory was a rallying cry for many protestors during the revolution, and he’s also an inspiration for the soldiers heading to the front to defend their nation against Russian aggression. “Ukrainian soldiers who serve at the front now are issued with a miniature camouflaged copy of his poetry collection ‘Kobzar,’” said Myroslava Hartmond, the owner of Kiev’s Triptych gallery.

As Lenin statues come crashing down, monuments to Shevchenko are being erected. The czar’s former gadfly has been transformed by a young independent Ukraine into the national poet of its burgeoning cultural renaissance. A poem inscribed on his statue in one of Kiev’s central parks named after him, ends with the prophetic words:

Bury me and arise, break your chains

And sprinkle your freedom

With the enemy’s evil blood.

Vijai Maheshwari is a writer and entrepreneur based in Kiev, Ukraine. He spent six years in Moscow in the 1990s, and was also editor in chief of Russian Playboy.